Industrial and residential power consumers are increasingly looking for ways to address the following needs: the need for cost saving through active management of power consumption (this typically includes strategies to save money by changing when and how energy is consumed); the need for compliance with industry or national standards which can unlock subsidies or fit within corporate social responsibility (CSR) policies of companies; and the need (for industrial consumers) for increased transparency on energy cost and its drivers to increase quality of internal financial reporting.
In order to address abovementioned needs for a residential consumer or company with industrial activities, one of the first steps is often to make the energy consumption of various power consuming devices (“loads”) present at the industrial site or house more transparent to the consumer or to factory management and operators, and to detail the actual costs at a load or process level, rather than site level. This makes it easier to identify which loads are using most energy and which trends are present in their power consumption, and to perform a variety of analysis on the data.
In many factories and residences today, however, the only reliable metering data is delivered by the utility supplying the power, and only (i) at the level of the total industrial site, often times (ii) no more frequently than on a month-by-month basis, and often times (iii) only on a quarter-hourly or half-hourly basis. Such limited information typically does not lend itself well for industrial power consumers to perform analysis on the power consumption of loads resulting in actionable conclusions.
A traditional approach to better address the abovementioned needs is to install energy (or power) meters at one or more loads on site, log the metering values to a database and also to link this to a visualization tool that allows analysis of the energy consumption of the various loads. The installation of such power metering, however, can be expensive and operationally complex, given the hardware needed, installation, and visualization software costs.
Numerous prior art techniques have been proposed, some with varying levels of success, but all unable to accurately output in real time the power usage of individual loads within a site, without the use of an individual power meter on each load.
Accordingly, there is a need for techniques and apparatus to provide better transparency into the power consumption of loads within an industrial site.